Soldiers of Revolution: The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune

Abstract

Osbourne House on the Isle of Wight was Queen Victoria's favorite home and is now cared for by English Heritage. A “Swiss Cottage” in the grounds houses an eclectic museum put together by her children. One of the exhibits is a glass bottle allegedly carried during the Paris Commune of 1871 by a female incendiary (a petroleuse) who was summarily executed by government troops. The object testifies to horrific justification felt by polite Western society at the worst massacre in French history, which is at the heart of Mark Lause's latest book.Military history is too important to leave to traditional “drum and trumpet” military historians. Soldiers of Revolution joins a growing literature from labor historians interested in the role of working people in war. Examples include work of the late Victor Kiernan on transnational imperial armies, that of Peter Way and Jennine Hurl-Eamon on the eighteenth-century British army, and my own two-volume labor history on class, politics, and the nineteenth-century British army. More specialized publications include Roger Norman Buckley on the British army in the West Indies and slavery, Peter Stanley on the private army of the East India Company, and Joseph Cozens on the military and popular protest in Britain. An edited volume by Nir Arielli and Bruce Collins also covers some aspects of liberal and socialist transnational soldiers. Having previously published widely on this topic covering the period of the American Civil War, Mark Lause has accepted the challenge of using largely French sources to study a contemporaneous European conflict.It is a dense and closely argued account of an unnecessary dynastic war, the attempt by a revived French Republic to regroup after disaster, and, finally, the utter defeat of the working class led by utopian socialists in a bloodbath that took place on Paris streets familiar to tourists today. Though assuming a certain amount of knowledge from the reader, the heady chronological narrative, supported by a wide-ranging information, is completely gripping and includes a wealth of fascinating detail.The largely professional French Imperialist military endured a swift defeat at the hands of cleverly directed German conscripts backed by the industrialized might of Krupps and Co. Nevertheless, the newly proclaimed Republic improvised an army to continue the war, which reflected the rising class tensions in French society. The army was largely formed from the mobiles, the active sections of the part-time and territorial National Guard. In addition, units of self-governing francs-tireurs sprang up in patriotic fervor. Often lacking munitions or uniforms, they sometimes took the fight behind enemy lines and risked German firing squads if captured. Particular attention is also given to the militarized transnational idealists who rallied from all over Europe and beyond under the democratic socialist and republican banner of the charismatic revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. One Italian comrade later wrote of the old warrior's inspiration: “[We were] not soldiers of a nation, of a government or of a faction. We were the soldiers of humanity . . . a unique principle for the Republic” (175). Garibaldi and his volunteers scored some of the few successes against the German onslaught in eastern France.Given that these unofficial soldiers left few records, most remain faceless, though the deeds and motivations of some of their commanders are better known and are described in some detail. After service in the French army, Gustave Cluseret took part in the French Revolution of 1848 and the Italian unification in 1860. He became a Union general in the American Civil War before directing Irish Fenian raids on Canada. He seemed a natural choice for Delegate of War for the Paris Commune in 1871 but was deposed and imprisoned for trying to impose central discipline and organization on the sometimes mutinous forces of defense. This may have saved his life, as he went into hiding and then exile. Cluseret later returned under amnesty and was elected as a socialist deputy in 1884.Reactionaries of both Thiers's French Republican government and Bismarck's new German Second Reich perceived with horror the hidden hand of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), formed in 1864, in these mobilizations. Lause carefully explores this network throughout the story. While acknowledging its influence, he concludes that the IWA was generally powerless, in contrast to the views of both left- and right-wing commentators at the time and more recently.The IWA's most significant moment was during the Paris Commune with many of its Central Committee claiming loyalty. The Communards, with their vigorous left-wing program, were regarded as beyond civilized society. The failure of supporting provincial communes left Paris dangerously isolated. The occupying German forces blockaded the east of the city, allowing Thiers's nominally Republican troops, many of whom were returned prisoners of war, to close in from the west. Though the Communards were poor military organizers, the Commune inspired the Parisian working class (men, women, and children) to mobilize in a heroic and bloody resistance street by street, in which few prisoners were taken. “Fuelled by desperation and hope,” this fighting climaxed in the semaine sanglante, in which the self-destructive petroleuses may have been active, resulting in over seventeen thousand dead and over forty thousand captured; most of the latter were deported to overseas penal colonies (219).The “Soldiers of Revolution” had failed completely, with only the myth of the “might have beens” of the Paris Commune surviving to sustain the left. In France the Second Republic of conservatives was strengthened, and in newly unified Germany, Prussian autocracy dominated. It would take generations before political change was achieved.